Edward Seaga
The Right Honourable Edward Philip George Seaga (born May 28, 1930) was Prime Minister of Jamaica for the Jamaica Labour Party from 1980 to 1989, and served as leader of the opposition 1989 to January 2005. Seaga's retirement from political life marked the end of a long generation, he was the last serving politician to have entered public life before independence.
Seaga was born in 1930, in Boston, Massachusetts to a family of Levantine Christian Arab origin.
He entered politics as a member of the appointed Legislative Council, the upper house of the pre-independence legislature in 1959. He made his mark in one of his first speeches as a legislator on the theme of 'The Haves and Have Nots'. In the 1960s and 1970s he served as minister of development and welfare in the government of Alexander Bustamante and as minister of finance under Hugh Shearer. He became leader of the JLP in 1974, after becoming MP for Western Kingston in 1962.
Initially seen as a man of the left when he began his political career, Seaga moved to the right when he took over the JLP from Hugh Shearer in 1974 in a sustained attempt to wrest political power from the rival People's National Party led by Michael Manley. In this regard Seaga helped foment a culture of political terror that bordered on civil war in the 1970s. To ensure external support that would lead to electoral success, Seaga's Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) is alleged to have actively supported and funded many of Jamaica's vicious gangsters and street gangs who unleashed a reign of terror in which many homes were set on fire, people shot as they tried to escape the inferno and fire-trucks prevented from putting out the fires. His efforts were counteracted by the party of his opponent, Prime Minister Michael Manley, but the forces of the JLP prevailed even though Manley won the 1976 general elections.
For a while things were comparitively quiet in Jamaica. But by early 1978 the long and bloody campaign leading to the October 1980 election was renewed in earnest. It was at this time that Seaga made it clear in both Washington and Kingston that he would align Jamaica with the United States, break diplomatic relations with Cuba, and abolish the levy that Manley had placed on bauxite, and which had angered the mainly US bauxite companies. It was at this time too that he spoke often about Jamaica needing "a military solution." Indeed, the tenor of his speeches and activities in the US led to his being censured by the Jamaican parliament in 1979.
But, weary of the escalating violence, the electorate dumped the PNP and elected Seaga. His electoral victory in October 1980 (the JLP won 51 of the 60 seats in Jamaica's House of Representatives), led to his becoming one of the first foreign heads of government to visit newly elected US president Ronald Reagan early the next year. With Tom Adams of Barbados, Seaga was one of the architects of the Caribbean Basin Initiative sponsored by Reagan. He delayed his promise tocut diplomatic relations with Cuba until a year later when he accused the Cuban government of giving asylum to Jamaican criminals.
The collapse of the revolutionary regime in Grenada, and the US invasion of that island in October 1983, got stalwart support from Seaga. On the back of the Grenada invasion, Seaga called snap elections at the end of 1983, which Manley's Opposition party boycotted. His party thus controlled all seats in parliament. In an unusual move, because the Jamaican constitution required that there be an opposition in the appointed Senate, Seaga appointed eight independent senators to form an official opposition. It is to his credit that he avoided turning the country into a dictatorship during this period.
Never as universally popular as Michael Manley, Seaga's fortunes slumped after 1983, in large part because he lost US support when he was unable to deliver on his early promises of removing the bauxite levy. Indeed, a spate of articles attacking Seaga now appeared in the US media and a gilt-edged committee of US businessmen led by David Rockefeller which had descended on Jamaica after the 1980 election packed up their bags and went home in disgust. Rioting in 1987 and 1988, the fact that Michael Manley had remained consistently the most popular politician in Jamaica, and complaints of governmental incompetence in the wake of the devastation of the island by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, also contributed to his defeat in the 1989 elections.
Seaga remained leader of the Jamaica Labour Party until January of 2005. He made several attempts to regain the Prime Ministership, running unsuccessfully against Manley's successor Percival Patterson in three more elections before stepping down as party chief.